It’s summer time, and that means...Learning Ally’s Summer Reading Together!

Each year, students all over the country compete for monthly and grand prizes while completing summer reading assignments and fighting summer slide.  It’s a great program and motivates students to continue building their reading and comprehension skills. The students can read anything available on Learning Ally, including material assigned as summer reading and books that are just for fun.  To help them get started, the Family part of our website includes a link to Learning Ally Featured Books, grouped by themes such as Summer Reading Together: Space Exploration and Learning Ally Featured Books from Best-Selling Series, and includes books ranging from items based on movies to classic literature.  To explore our current list, click here:

https://learningally.org/Portals/6/Docs/SummerReading/SummerReadingLists.pdf

In addition, we have a Vocabulary Challenge for them on social media, where they can upload video recommendations of summer reading books, or post three to six vocabulary words that they learned during their summer reading experience.  Participants will be entered into a raffle, and one lucky winner will be the proud owner of a new Chromebook at the end of the summer!

Metrics Update for this week:

• Our readers increased to 208,500

• We’ve had over 137 million pages read--an increase of 66% over last year for school readers!

• We had 45,743 reading at frequency*

Keep up the great work, everyone!  We're looking forward to a terrific summer!

*at frequency = students are reading books multiple times during the school year, with a general target of thirty times (more for lower grades, less for upper grades).  Our data shows that most of these students read for at least 20 minutes each time.

We are very pleased to announce a new EasyBooks release! 

This new version 4.020 offers several new features that we think you will like:

• More keyboard shortcuts;
• A feature that helps eliminate click sounds on stop/start of recording;
• Mac Mojave compatibility; and
• Added support for bold, italics, underline and active hyperlinks in the notes field.
  You can do these by clicking Ctrl-B, Ctrl-I, Ctrl-U to turn it on and then click it again to turn it off (or select the text you want to change and use the same key combination to apply it).
  Hyperlinks should be automatic for any address that starts with http, https or www.
   

Links to the installation instructions are here and also linked from the EasyBooks homescreen (you may need to scroll down a bit):
EasyBooks for PC 4.020
EasyBooks for Mac 4.020

Not sure which version you have? Check the top bar and it will show which version you have. Please contact Vol-Support@LearningAlly.org if you need any help with the update or installation.

For more detail, please see our EasyBooks version doc.